4/01/2009 @ 4:00PM

In Depth: America's Most Livable Cities

To form our list, we looked at quality of life measures in the nation’s largest continental U.S. metropolitan statistical areas–geographic entities defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget for use by federal agencies in collecting, tabulating and publishing federal statistics. We eliminated areas with populations smaller than 500,000 and assigned points to the remaining metro regions across five data sets: five-year income growth per household and cost of living from Moody’s Economy.com; crime data and leisure index from Sperling’s Best Places; and annual unemployment statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.